Social Media MarketingI took on a new client this month – I’ll be handling his digital marketing strategy. He’s a great guy running a successful small business here in St. Louis – just admittedly not “tech savvy.” I’m setting up and running his LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ pages, doing some ghost writing for a book he wants to publish, and will be an extra creative in the room for whatever else he needs marketing/public relations-wise.

We’ve hit it off swimmingly (I love helping people like this), and it was interesting why I got the account after he interviewed half a dozen or so.  He said everybody else came in, sat down, and talked, talked, talked. They did all the talking, telling him how they can get him thousands of “friends” and set up Twitter so it seems like he’s tweeting every hour, etc. Sounds like they rattled off a lot of buzz words without even figuring out what he knew about digital marketing and the social media landscape.

“You asked a lot of questions about my business,” he said.

It’s true. For the first two meetings he did all the talking. A journalist at heart, before I start providing content for a company, I want to understand it. I learned how this particular insurance broker works, how he’s attracted business in the past, and what he wants to accomplish. I took every marketing piece he had home and studied it, and came back with more questions.

See, in the faced-pace world of digital marketing, it is not a one-size-fits-all situation. For example, it became clear that Twitter is not going to be that useful for his specialized business, and LinkedIn would actually be the best ROI. I will be developing a YouTube channel for him and get his webinars to be both higher quality and gain more viewers.

So if you’re interviewing a consultant to help with your digital marketing, and he or she leaves, ask yourself this: Who did most of the talking?

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